Ten film critics’ polls in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., have named Sideways the best movie of the year. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Director and cowriter Alexander Payne has nothing to say about over-the-hill males that we don’t already know or couldn’t find in a sitcom. The main characters, pals driving north from San Diego for a few days of vacation, are a depressive, recently divorced wine snob and schoolteacher (Giamatti) who can’t publish his novel and his former college roommate (Church), a cheerful TV actor the movie eventually discards. The music is a Muzak imitation of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Payne isn’t doing anything special with the images and sounds. Overall the film is unoriginal and unchallenging–unless one considers an obsession with wine a daring subject.
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The Big Red One: The Reconstruction
Moolaade
Andersen examines 191 cinematic depictions of Los Angeles over 169 minutes, yielding the best sustained work of film criticism I encountered all year. Unabashedly crotchety and often hilarious as it juxtaposes the city itself with almost a century’s worth of fantasy about it, this essay about local folklore, architecture, real estate, car culture, mass transit, and lost neighborhoods and lifestyles never loses sight of what the movies in question are doing as movies.
- Before Sunset
